Students - You have a great opportunity available in the fall: Linked Class Learning Communities! These consist of two great courses taught by professors in two different departments, that are linked in terms of their learning goals and learning activities.
Please consider joining one of these two communities by registering for the two linked courses. (You will not be able to register for any linked course unless you also take the other.) It will be a wonderful opportunity to experience interdisciplinary collaboration and an experiential learning process. It will also be a great way to get to know your classmates better by taking two of the same courses and engaging in outside activities together.
Descriptions of the two Learning Communities:
WRITING CHINA
Linked Courses: Fall 2011
MLCH 171 Elementary Chinese I (Gen Ed Goal 3) – MWRF 10:30-11:20
ENGL 110 Expository Writing (Gen Ed Goal 1) – MW 2:30-4:20
Faculty:
Dr. Mary-Ann Stadtler-Chester (Modern Languages)
Dr. Kelly Matthews (English)
Summary:
This learning community will link classes in Elementary Chinese I and Expository Writing. Students will read about and research contemporary issues in Chinese culture and US-China relations while they gain initial competence in Mandarin Chinese. Students will tour Yin Yu Tang, a Qing dynasty Chinese house re-constructed at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, and will visit Boston’s Chinatown on multiple occasions, for a dim sum breakfast, a dinner banquet, and a historical walking tour. Throughout the semester, students will be linked to Chinese student “e-pals” in China, and will be able to ask them about their attitudes toward family, work, relationships, and other social issues. Guest speakers will introduce Chinese history, politics, and film. By learning about Chinese language and cultural issues, students will have the opportunity to expand their perceptions of today’s world and reflect on their own cultural heritage and values.
SUCKER POND: ENVIRONMENT, PHYSICS, ETHICS, WRITING
Linked Courses: Fall 2011
PHYS 201 Introductory Physics (Gen Ed Goal 6, lab) – TR 8:30-10:20, lab M 2:30-5:20
ENGL 287 Writing about Science – MW 8:30-10:30
Faculty:
Dr. Patricia Lynn (English)
Dr. Vandana Singh (Physics & Earth Science)
Summary:
This linked courses community offers the chance for students to use interdisciplinary lenses to learn about the urgent global issue of the environment. Combining what they learn in Introductory Physics about scientific principles, data gathering and data interpretation with scientific communication methods and creative reflection in Writing about Science, students will perform a multidisciplinary study of Sucker Pond, an environmentally compromised wetland in Framingham. While protected on paper, the pond is an example of the problems that arise at the boundary of human land and the wilderness. The work of our learning community will culminate in a printed book about Sucker Pond—including reports, proposals, photographs, charts, and creative reflections on the experience. These courses together with this project will offer each student an opportunity to interact with science as a whole person, not only as a scientist, but also as a citizen, poet, organizer, and activist.
For Spring of 2012
Students Explore Victorians’ Secrets!
Linked Courses: Spring 2012
ENGL 250 Literature & Gender: Victorian Sexualities
ARTH 200 Art & Social Values
Faculty:
Dr. Elizabeth Perry (Art & Music)
Dr. Lynn Parker (English)
Summary
Dr. Elizabeth Perry, of the Art & Music Department, and Dr. Lynn Parker, of the English Department, will teach a linked-class learning community entitled “Victorians’ Secrets” this fall. The art and literature of Victorian England is characterized by great craftsmanship and intensely seductive beauty. Close study, however, will reveal the harsher realities of Victorian culture buried just below the gleaming surfaces of art. Contrary to popular stereotypes, the Victorian period was a time of dynamic social change whose concerns powerfully intersect those of young people today. Through the lens of “Victorians’ Secrets,” students will probe the underbelly of late-nineteenth-century society in order to shine a light on our own cultural secrets. In a final creative group project, the learning community will bring their new critical awareness of the Victorian cultural period—its problems and accomplishments—to the challenges of life in our own fast-paced, culturally rich, and deeply troubled world.
The "Making" of Sexuality in Western Culture
Linked Courses: Spring 2012
HIS365 History of Gender, Sexuality, & the Body
SOC369 Sex/Sexualities and Society
Faculty:
Dr. Bridgette Sheridan (History)
Dr. Virginia Rutter (Sociology)
Summary:
History and sociology offer distinct approaches to sex; combined they show us diverse, contradictory, and submerged ways that sexuality—for individuals and societies--takes shape. Think about: What is normal or deviant? Why does it change depending on circumstance? What does it mean that it changes? Students will learn how sexuality is made; that it goes beyond an expression of biology or some “essential nature.”
“'Making' of Sexuality” is not limited to conventional classroom experience. Students engage through discussion boards, guest speakers and campus events, international dialogues – via Skype – with sexuality experts from around the world, films, an all-campus event featuring sexuality expert Dr. Pepper Schwartz, and collaborations with FSU student organizations. As a learning community, students will have regular joint dialogues with both professors and separate class meetings. The classes culminate in case studies viewed through history and sociology: same-sex marriage, sexual identity in global context, and what “sexual freedom” has meant and means now in Western culture. A capstone project includes writing a policy proposal using historical and sociological perspectives.
Greening Urban Climates
Linked Courses: Spring 2012
GEOG265 Global Cities
EASC131 Conversations with the Earth
Faculty:
Dr. Judith Otto (Geography)
Dr. Larry McKenna (Physics & Earth Science)
Summary:
Our linked learning community will give students the tools to understand and address the challenges and opportunities of increasing urbanization in the world, through understanding of population growth, energy flows, and resource management. The linked course integrates earth systems science (understanding, measuring, and anticipating anthropogenic changes within earth systems) with urban geography, organized around the central concept of sustainability. In Geog 265, Global Cities, students will answer the question: what general principles can be used to solve urban problems, and where might solutions be unique to the particular place? In EASC 131, Conversations with the Earth, students learn that humans influence earth’s climate through subtle changes to the “levers” that control climate. Students see that sustainability involves not only consuming materials at rates lower than they are replaced, but also consuming them in a way that minimizes humans’ effect on those control levers. Students then move on to discover how societies can, if they wish, either adapt to or mitigate the effects of changes.
